@Zaphide:
1. Thanks so much for allowing me to release my mod of your mod, I'm very excited about it, it's already playing very well.
2. I wrote up new code that:
A. Gives Factions a ship-list they use internally when determining what to put into their inventories. Same with weapons; an external file for mod-specific stuff means easier maintenance and potentially mods could be built with an Exerelin-compatible config, so that Exerelin does not need to have any internal references to Factions at all any more (well, provided that the mod authors don't do certain bad things with names).
B. Gives the mod a unique substance to mine (called "Germanium"- it's both a
real thing and it's a
very old sci-fi reference).
C. Tweaks how the Factions work a bit. Still working on that one. Basically, I am trying to get the Station-defense idea working.
3. Some ideas about how to further enhance the gameplay:
A. If player level > 10, stock their friendly Stations with Assault Troops, a Resource that, if "sold" to another Faction's station, gives a chance of taking it over. This isn't necessary past 0.6, where it should be possible to just invade the place with Marines (finally, yes!).
B. If player level > 30, the Storage Depot should spawn an item called "Strategic Target", that, if placed in another Faction's station, re-targets the strategic AI of your Faction on that location until the player buys it back and moves it somewhere else. I don't know if 0.6 will obsolete that; it may be possible to write a dialog option that will allow players to cycle through the enemy-held Stations instead.
C. I think that the player's actions in general needs to influence things economically /strategically more. For example, if the player's really destroying a lot of the enemy, there should be a much higher chance of friendly invasion fleets coming in to finish the job.
D. There aren't quite enough signals about why your Faction's not building new fleets or fleets with enough power to tackle the huge enemy fleets that can build up if one of the Factions gains a lot of Stations. I'm going to look at that and see if I can make it so that if the player delivers Germanium and Fuel to the friendly Stations, they get a big boost in productivity, giving the player something to do besides just kill stuff once they're past the early phase. Once combat gets heavy, many Factions can't mine and are effectively dead economically, which is a drag if you happen to belong to one of the dead factions.
E. It'd be nice if the faction names had their first names capitalized in statements.
F. It'd be nice if, instead of 'Exerelin' the statements used the System name. Pretty important when we're able to have more than one System.
G. It'd be nice, in a game where the Factions can't respawn, for there to be an item the player could use to revive his / her Faction, if he/she can stay alive long enough.
H. The bare-bones version should have the faction files standardized to just have the "exerelin_blah" fleet types, as a clear guide. That was one of the longer grinds, in terms of getting my mod set up, since I have all of the Factions using unique ships (no more Heg / Pirate being pretty much the same, etc.).
Anyhow, just some preliminary thoughts; getting the mod ported is pretty much feature-complete, so I'm looking for ways to further enhance things so that the five-way wars can be really interesting and the player can help create the outcome if they play it well.
Oh, and ... I've noticed that at Stations, only my Faction's Stations get any ships or weapons delivered. Is that a feature, and if so, how do I disable it? It's a real drag having no way to get a lot of things other than capture --> OmniFactory. I've played tonight and have > $500K in the bank, wiith nothing to spend it on because my Faction got kicked around in early game, and there aren't any capital ships to buy, so I can't quite get my fleet to the point where it can be expected to single-handedly slay all the defending fleets around an enemy base. Bit of a deadlock atm, until I manage to capture an enemy capital ship.[EDIT]
Forgot that I fixed that last evening, when I started writing this. Fixed, got a capship finally, from one of the Trade League runs

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